03.29.2013 09:10 AM

If the problem is that fewer people are reading you, would your solution be to give fewer people the ability to read you?

The Internet has a culture. It’s too late to change it. Worth a read (and for free, too).

5 Comments

  1. dave says:

    Capitalism is,primarily, a system for accumulating wealth for private use. The 1st step in capitalism is to have a self styled power or authority grant a charter, or incorporation papers privatizing a part of the common wealth. The next step is use of that privatized property to accumulate wealth.

    We live in a capitalist system. Capitalist thinking is trying hard to figure out ways to privatize the apparent common wealth that is the internet. Those capitalists lobby government like crazy to get government to use its law and police and whatnot to enable them to privatize the internet common wealth. People like ‘Anonymous’ are trying to thwart the capitalists.
    (Those capitalists are so irksome: They get the crown to carve off a piece of the common wealth and give them exclusive use of it, then they turn around and gloat “We did it all ourselves.” They are so irksome.)

    Anyway, this is an interesting century, watching the struggle for control of the internet, and the internet’s challenges to capitalism’s commodification and exclusive ownership of everything.

    • smelter rat says:

      There’s a perfect analogy to how 1st Nations people feel about their situation in your example!

    • Just to be clear though, the internet isn’t like other examples of common wealth. It does not exist except by the investment and actions of several government and corporate entities at great expense. A lake “runs” itself, a DNS Server does not.

      It is naive to say that the culture of the internet is fixed; as a kid in the mid 90’s I understood quite clearly that this was a system I would have to pay to use in some capacity. The idealism of a mode for the uncensored/unregulated ideas was not yet blurred with the selfish nonsense of today’s “hacktivists” OR the corporatization of access and eventually of content.

      That maturity seems to have vanished over the interceding twenty years, but only a fool would suggest that only the corporations have lost their way.

  2. That was aninteresting read. I wonder how our lives will change as a consequence? If subscribers, and users of information are no longer willing to pay for it’s provision, then who is likely to want to pay for collection and publication of information? Obviously, it will be a lot of people who have a strong interest in presenting THEIR information to the general public. So when consumers no longer determine content quality, what kind of content are we going to be consuming? You can see the beginnings of a trend in Canada. The obvious trend is when publications that are increasingly dependant upon government advertising spending are harmonizing their editorial stances with the Governments communications strategy. It is especially pronounced in small ethnic press and localised publications. I would guess that there is ever more ‘content’ being provided ‘free’ for publication by people who have a strong interest in shaping opinions in many different subject areas.
    It would be nice if there were some way to create a core of professional Journalists, who delivered un-biased news, such that people would actually be willing to pay a subscription to read their offerings. Large flagship news organisations have tried to do this, but they are all playing the same game of branding their own service at the expense of their competetors. If there were some way to collect all the ‘real’ news organisations and their journo’s together, then even small but excellent publications could leverage the brand, and actually make money from providing real news. The Hill Times is an excellent example. I would love to have free access to them, and if say the BBC, Washington Post, NY Times, maybe the Globe, and a number of solid Canadian news organisations were all paid under one subscription, then I would pony up $20 per month no problemo. It is the pain in the ass of setting up a gazillion little subscriptions, with passwords, and monthly billing that deters me most.

  3. Publius says:

    Let’s look at the bigger picture; penmanship, i.e. using your dominant hand to write words using a pen/pencil is obsolete now. It’s a qwerty world now and handwriting is too tedious and too difficult to master.

    Even grammar is a thing of the past because composition has become obsolete too. It’s a 140 character twitter-blurt world now, informing us about how you feeel. Fuck your feeel because your feeel lacks substance and is stupid too! So much for being congenial and an internet “friend”.

    Are we witnessing a dumbing-down generation emerging, or are they becoming more efficient in their communication ability? Many newspaper articles are written with one sentence paragraphs to convey information. Is that good, bad, or only reflects the short attention span of twitter-blurters?

    The brain is similar to a ‘muscle’ that increases or decreases the number of ‘cells’ needed to survive. If you sit a lot, your leg muscles shrivel away and we now see a lot of obese people with spindly legs, or fat legs with thin muscles. Same with the brain. 20% of the energy you consume goes into running the brain, and a smaller brain needs less food to function, which explains why people get fat; they don’t reduce their food input and it accumulates as fat.

    It’s known that fat people have more fat particles circulating in their blood, and their IQ is lowered too. That’s a brutal fact, and together with a smaller brain volume you get a population who can’t write, can’t read and can’t cut the mustard either. They’re fuckless..!!!

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